Low Town lt-1

by Daniel Polansky

  They stopped at the entrance to the alleyway. Crispin’s gaze darted across the scene, resting briefly on the covered corpse before settling on Wendell, who stood stiffly at attention, doing his best impression of a law enforcement official. “Guardsman,” Crispin said, nodding sharply. The second agent, still unnamed, offered not even that, his arms firmly crossed and something like a smirk on his face. Sufficient attention paid to protocol, Crispin turned toward me. “You found her?”

  “Forty minutes ago, but she’d been here a while before that. She was dumped here after he finished with her.”

  Crispin paced a slow circle around the scene. A wooden door led into an abandoned building halfway down the alley. He paused and put his hand against it. “You think he came through here?”

  “Not necessarily. The body was small enough to be concealed-a small crate, maybe an empty cask of ale. At dusk, this street doesn’t get much traffic. You could dump it and keep walking.”

  “Syndicate business?”

  “You know better than that. An unblemished child goes for five hundred ochres in the pens of Bukhirra. No slaver would be foolish enough to ruin his profit-and if he was, he’d know a better way to dispose of the corpse.”

  This was too much deference shown to a stranger in a tattered coat for Crispin’s second. He sauntered over, flushed with the arrogance that comes from having one’s hereditary sense of superiority cemented by the acquisition of public office. “Who is this man? What was he doing when he found the body?” He sneered at me. I had to admit he knew how to sneer. For all its ubiquity it isn’t an expression that just anyone can master.

  But I didn’t respond to it, and he turned to Wendell. “Where are his effects? What was the result of your search?”

  “Well, sir,” Wendell started, his Low Town accent thickening. “Seeing as how he reported it, we figured… that’s to say…” He wiped his nose with the back of his fat hand and coughed out a response. “He hasn’t been searched, sir.”

  “Is this what passes for an investigation among the guard? A suspect is found standing beside a murdered child and you converse cordially with him over the corpse? Do your job and search this man!”

  Wendell’s dull face blushed. He shrugged apologetically and moved to pat me down.

  “That won’t be necessary, Agent Guiscard,” Crispin interrupted. “This man is… an old associate. He is above suspicion.”

  “Only in this matter, I assure you. Agent Guiscard, is it? By all means, Agent Guiscard, search me. You can never be too careful. Who’s to say I didn’t kidnap the child, rape and torture her, dump her body, wait an hour, then call the guard?” Guiscard’s face turned a dull shade of red, a strange contrast to his hair. “Quite a prodigy, aren’t we? I guess that set of smarts came standard with your pedigree.” Guiscard balled his fist. I swelled out my grin.

  Crispin cut between the two of us and began barking orders. “None of that. There’s work to be done. Agent Guiscard, return to Black House and tell them to send a scryer, if you double-step it there might still be time for him to pick something up. The rest of you, set up a perimeter. There’s going to be half a hundred citizens here in ten minutes and I don’t want them mucking up the crime scene. And for the love of Sakra, one of you find this poor child’s parents.” Guiscard glared at me ineffectually, then stomped off. Wendell and the rest of the guardsmen fanned out.

  I shook some leaf out of my pouch and started to roll a smoke. “New partner’s quite a handful. Whose nephew is he?”

  Crispin gave a half smile. “The Earl of Grenwick’s.”

  “Good to see nothing’s changed.”

  “He’s not as bad as he looks. You were pushing him.”

  “He was easy to push.”

  “So were you, once.”

  He was probably right about that. Age had mellowed me, or at least I liked to think so. I offered the cigarette to my ex-partner.

  “I quit-it was ruining my wind.”

  I wedged it between my lips. Years of friendship stretched out awkwardly between us.

  “If you discover something, you’ll come to me. You won’t do anything yourself,” Crispin said, somewhere between an inquiry and a demand.

  “I don’t solve crimes, Crispin, because I’m not an agent.” I struck a match against the wall and lit my smoke. “You made sure of that.”

  “You made sure of that. I just watched while you fell.”

  This had gone on too long. “There was an odor on the corpse. It might be gone by now, but it’s worth checking.” I couldn’t bring myself to wish him luck.

  A crowd of onlookers was forming as I left the cover of the alleyway, the specter of human misery always a popular draw. The wind had picked up. I pulled my coat tight and hurried my steps.

  Back at the Staggering Earl the weekend trade was in full swing. Adolphus’s greeting echoed off the walls as I fought my way through the tight ranks of patrons and took a seat at the bar. He poured a glass of beer and leaned in as he handed it to me. “The boy arrived with your package. I put it in your room.”

  Somehow I had expected the urchin would come through.

  Adolphus stood there awkwardly, a look of concern on his mangled face. “He told me what you found.”

  I took a sip of my drink.

  “If you want to talk…”

  “I don’t.”

  The ale was thick and dark, and I made my way through a half-dozen drafts trying to get the sight of twisted hands and pale, bruised skin out of my head. The crowd surged around me, factory workers finished with their shifts and bravos planning the night’s escapades. We were doing the kind of business that reminded me why I was part owner, but the mass of amiable lowlifes imbibing cheap liquor were poor company for my mood.

  I drained my cup and stood. Adolphus waved away a customer and came over. “You leaving?”

  I grunted assent. The look on my face must have betokened violence, because he put one huge paw on my arm as I turned away.

  “You need a blade? Or company?”

  I shook my head, and he shrugged and returned to chatting up patrons.

  I had been saving a visit to Tancred the Harelip since I saw one of his runners moving dreamvine on my territory a half month prior. Tancred was a small-time operator who had managed to claw his way to minor prominence by an unsavory combination of cheap violence and low cunning, but he wouldn’t be able to hold on to it for more than a few seasons. He’d underpay his boys, or try to cheat the guard out of their percentage, or piss off a syndicate and die in an alley with a poniard in his vitals. I hadn’t ever seen any great need to hasten his appointment with She Who Waits Behind All Things, but mistakes don’t get made in our business. Selling on my territory was sending me a message, and etiquette demanded a response.

  Harelip had carved a thin slice of turf west of the canal, near Offbend, and he ran his operations from a dump of a bar called the Bleeding Virgin. He made most of his money from the trades that were too small or ugly for the syndicate boys to touch, moving wyrm and bleeding protection money out of whatever neighboring merchants were pitiful enough to pay. It was a long walk to his shit establishment, but it would give me time to clear my head from the booze. I went upstairs to retrieve a bottle of pixie’s breath and started over.

  The west end of Low Town was quiet, the merchants gone home and the nightlife pressed toward the docks, so I walked the dozen blocks to the canal in relative solitude. This late in the evening the Herm Bridge looked ominous instead of just dilapidated, its marble features made indistinct by time and petty vandalism. The ragged hands of stone Daevas curled in supplication to the heavens, their faces worn to wide eyes and gaping mouths. Beneath it the River Andel ran sluggish and slow, carrying the city’s waste in a stately procession toward the harbor and out to sea. I continued on, stopping at the entrance of a nondescript building a half mile west.

  Noise from the second floor drifted down to the shadows beneath. I took a hit of breath, then another and another unt
il the bottle was empty and the buzzing was like a crowd of bees swarming around my ears. I dashed it against the wall and took the steps two at a time.

  The Bleeding Virgin was the kind of dive that made you want to scrub your skin with lye as soon as you walked out-it made the atmosphere at the Earl look like high tea at the royal court. Torches shed greasy light on the unpalatable interior, a crumbling wooden infrastructure set over a handful of rooms that Harelip rented by the hour, along with a stable of sad-looking whores. These last doubled as servers, the dim illumination sufficient to display a lengthy commitment to their vocation.

  I grabbed a spot across from a breach in the wall that served duty as a window and waved down one of the waitresses. “You know who I am?” I asked. She nodded, dun hair atop a stretched face, crooked eyes dull and unfazed. “Get me something that hasn’t been spit in and tell your boss I’m here.” I flipped her a copper and watched her walk off wearily.

  The breath was kicking in hard, and I held my fists tight at my sides to keep them from shaking. I glared at the patrons warily and thought about how far one well-placed act of arson would go toward improving the neighborhood. The server returned a few minutes later with a half-full tankard. “He’ll be out soon,” she said.

  The beer was mostly rainwater. I choked it down and tried not to think about the child.

  The back door opened and Harelip and two of his boys slid in. Tancred was aptly named-the crevice in his face split his mouth straight through, an aberration his thick beard did nothing to hide. Beyond that, there was little to recommend him one way or the other. Somewhere along the line he had acquired a reputation for being a hard man, though I suspected this was an outgrowth of his deformity.

  The two hangers-on looked violent and stupid-the kind of cheap street toughs Tancred liked to keep around. I knew the first-Spider, a squat half-Islander runt with a lazy eye he’d picked up from getting rambunctious around a troop of guardsmen. He used to run with a small-time crew of river rats, busting into cargo barges late at night and making off with whatever they could find. I’d never seen the second, but his pockmarked face and sour odor bespoke ill breeding as surely as his surroundings and choice of career. I assumed they were both armed, although only Spider’s weapon was visible, an ugly-looking dirk that jutted obtrusively from his belt.

  They fanned out to cover me. “Hello, Tancred. What’s the good word?”

  He sneered at me, or maybe he didn’t-the lip made it tough to tell.

  “I hear your people have been having trouble with their lode-stones,” I continued.

  Now I was pretty confident he was sneering. “Trouble, Warden? How do you mean?”

  “The canal is the line between our two enterprises, Tancred. You know the canal. It’s that big ditch to the east of here, filled with water.”

  He smiled, the fleshless stretch between his upper lip and nose rendering his rotting gums starkly visible. “Was that the line?”

  “In our business it’s important to remember your agreements. If you’re having trouble, it might be time to look for work more in keeping with your natural talents. You’d make a lovely chorus girl.”

  “You’ve got a sharp mouth,” he growled.

  “And you’ve got a crooked one-but we are as the Creator formed us. Regardless, Tancred, I’m not here to debate theology-geography is the interest of the moment. So why don’t you go ahead and remind me where our boundary is?”

  Harelip took a step backward, and his boys moved closer. “Seems to me it might be time to redraw our map. I don’t know what you’ve got going with the syndicates, and I don’t care how friendly you are with the guard-you don’t have the muscle to hold the land you got. Far as I can tell, you’re an independent operator, and there ain’t no place for an independent operator these days.”

  He kept nerving himself into the conflict that was coming, but I could barely hear him through the drone in my ears. Not that the particulars of his monologue much mattered. I hadn’t come over here for discussion, and he hadn’t rolled out his mob to help him negotiate.

  The ringing faded as Tancred completed whatever ultimatum he was making. Spider rested a hand on his weapon. The unnamed thug flicked his tongue off a toothy grin. Somehow they had fallen under the impression that this was going to go easy-I was looking forward to disabusing them.

  I finished my last swallow of ale and dropped the tankard with my left hand. Spider watched it shatter on the ground and I lashed out with my right fist, breaking his nose back into his face. Before his partner could draw a weapon, I wrapped my arms around his shoulders and launched us both through the open window behind him.

  For a half second all I could hear was the rush of the wind and the rapid pulse of my heart. Then we hit the ground, and my hundred-and-eighty-pound frame buried him faceup in the mud, a low crack letting me know the fall had broken a few of his ribs. I rolled off him and pulled myself to my feet. The moon was very bright against the dark of the alleyway. I breathed in deep and felt the blood drain from my head. The pockmarked man struggled to right himself, and I snapped a boot across his scalp. He groaned and stopped stirring.

  Dimly I was aware that the fall had done something to my ankle, but I was too gone to feel it yet. I would need to finish this quick, before my body had time to wake to the harm I’d done it.

  I walked back into the Virgin and saw Spider sprinting down the steps at full speed, blood seeping from his nose, his blade in his hand. He snarled and came at me wildly-foolish, but then Spider was the sort of man who gets rattled by a little pain. I met him halfway and dropped low, setting my shoulder into his knees and sending him hurtling down the stairs. Turning back to finish the job, I saw the white press of bone sticking out from his hand and knew there was no point in further violence. I left him cradling his wrist and shrieking like a newborn.

  Back on the second floor the patrons were pressed against the walls, waiting to see the outcome. At some point while I was busy below, Tancred had grabbed a heavy wooden truncheon, and he rapped it against his outstretched palm. His warped face was twisted into a death mask and there was a long line of notches on the handle of his club, but his eyes were wide and I knew he would go down easy.

  I ducked as his cudgel wheezed over my head, then balled my fist into his stomach. Tancred stumbled backward, gasping for air, waving his bludgeon impotently. On the second swing I caught his wrist and twisted it savagely, pulling him close as he screamed and dropped his weapon. I held his gaze with mine, his ruined lips trembling, then struck him a blow that collapsed his legs under him.

  He lay at my feet, weeping piteously. The small crowd of spectators stared back at me, bulbous drunkard noses and mongoloid idiot eyes, a menagerie of inbred grotesques, mouth breathers, and vermin. I had the urge to grab Tancred’s cudgel and wade into them, just start clubbing heads, crack crack crack, soak the sawdust red. I shook it off, telling myself it was just the breath. It was time to end this, but not too quickly. Theatricality mattered-I wanted these dregs to spread what they were seeing.

  I dragged Harelip’s limp body toward a nearby table and stretched one arm across the wood. Holding his palm flat with my left hand, I took his small finger firmly in my right. “What’s our boundary?” I asked, snapping his digit.

  He screamed but didn’t answer.

  “What’s our boundary?” I continued, breaking the next finger. He was weeping now, gasping for air and barely capable of speech. He’d need to make the attempt. I twisted another finger. “You’ve got a whole other hand I haven’t touched!” I was laughing and wasn’t sure if it was part of the act. “What’s our boundary?”

  “The canal!” he shrieked. “The canal is the boundary!”

  The bar was silent but for his wailing. I swiveled my head at the onlookers, savoring the moment, then continued in a voice loud enough to be heard by the first ranks of the audience. “Your business ends at the canal. Forget again and they’ll find you floating in it.” I pulled back his last finger and let
him fall to the ground, then turned and walked slowly out. Spider sat slumped against the bottom of the stairs, and he looked away as I passed.

  A dozen blocks east, the breath wore off and I put my arm against an alley wall and spewed until I could barely breathe, sinking into the muck and grime. I knelt there for a while, waiting for my heartbeat to return to normal. On the way up my leg gave out, and I had to buy a crutch off a fake cripple so I could hobble the rest of the way home.

  I awoke with a headache that made my swollen ankle feel like a hand-job from a ten-ochre-an-hour hooker. I tried to stand, but my vision swirled and my stomach let me know it was up for a repeat of last night’s performance, so I sat back down. Prachetas’s cunt, if I never took another whiff of pixie’s breath it would be too damn soon.

  The sun streaming through my window meant it was past noon. My feeling has always been that if you’ve missed the morning you might as well go ahead and skip the afternoon as well, but there was work to do. I steadied myself, then pulled on my clothes and walked downstairs.

  I took a seat at the counter. Adolphus had forgotten to cover his eye, and the recess in his skull wagged disapproval at me. “It’s too late for eggs. Don’t even ask.” I had figured one o’clock was probably past the breakfast rush but wasn’t happy to have my suspicions confirmed. “The boy from last night has been waiting for you to wake up for the past three hours.”

  “Is there any coffee at least? And where is my shadow exactly?”

  “There is none, and he’s in the corner.” I turned to see the youth uncurl from a wall. He had an odd talent for remaining unnoticed, or maybe my hangover was worse than I’d thought.

  We looked at each other in silence, some natural reserve keeping him from beginning. “I didn’t idle half the morning away in front of your door,” I said. “What do you want?”